About 6.5 per cent of India's population suffers from severe mental illnesses including psychotic depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, mania and schizophrenia.

Around 8 crore people are suffering
from serious mental illnesses. These people suffer from depressive
thoughts or obsessive and compulsive thoughts or maniac thoughts or
schizophrenic thoughts.

In
Focus

They cannot work properly nor can they behave in a civilized
manner. They find it extremely difficult to make a living for
themselves or their families and are often reduced to the mercy of
their relatives. Sometimes, they are reduced to begging.

Many of them cannot go to sleep and most of them also suffer from
various sexual disorders including impotency. Their condition is
pitiable and mental illness being the worst of all illnesses, they
are virtually in hell in this world. They can be treated only by a
psychiatrist having an M.D. degree who prescribes them with various
medicines and drugs and also refers them to clinical and other such
psychologists like psycho-analysts for reforming their behaviour.

Yoga is also recommended but the psychiatrist remains responsible
for their overall treatment. The fee charged by private
psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and psycho-analysts is
prohibitive. So, mostly treatment has to be obtained from Government
run free hospitals.

However, the ratio of a psychiatrist to total number of mental
patients in India is 1:30,00,000 which is totally inadequate. Also
all the drugs prescribed by even the Government psychiatrists are not
available in the concerned Government hospital and have to be
purchased from chemists at a prohibitive cost.

Since Yoga, which is free, alone is not sufficient for curing the
mental patients, Government must undertake adequate steps to deal
with the problem of mental health.

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